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Comment by mooreds | Hacker News Reader

I love Firefox. First thing I install on any new computer. Super happy they keep pushing the web forward. Not a fan of the chromium quasi monopoly (not that the folks behind it are bad, just that any monoculture is problematic).

Thanks for pushing the web forward!

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The whole chromium project gives out the 'death star' vibe for me. I'm sure the engineers who are working on it are good people but the end result seem lead to destruction of open web as we know it by the Gempire.

You can actually grab non-google Chromium. This site keeps track of the latest stable and nightly builds and how to download them directly: https://chromium.woolyss.com/ You won't receive automatic updates, or be able to login to your google chrome account, etc. The theme is slightly different in color but it works exactly like normal Chrome. Chromium is the open source project that Chrome is based on, originally it was a web browser built by the KDE team for Linux.

I disagree that Chromium is evil. Personally, I use Firefox because I like it better. Though, on Android I use Brave which is based on Chromium and has ad blocking, privacy, and anti-fingerprinting built-in. Just a really quick easy way to get all of that in a simple no fuss package.

What Chromium implements is still controlled by Google.

For example the recent controversy about restricting API for ad blockers will affect Chromium as well.

If the "non-google" part is important to you, you'll probably want Ungoogled-Chromium or Iridium.

Interesting thing I noticed recently. I have weaned off of Google in all but calendar and Android and when I initially weaned off, my phone began pinging me to use Assistant more often. Could have been a coincidence, but I don't believe so.

I've recently begun running into internal facing web apps that only work in Chrome :(

> Thanks for pushing the web forward!

Making a browser that breaks extensions used by millions of people (Vimperator comes to mind) and making extension development harder is not pushing the web forward.

Vimperator was used by millions? I think it had about 10.000 users total.

Reality is, most popular add ons got ported very quickly, and the subsequent speed and reliability improvements for Firefox that would not have been possible while keeping the old extensions around have more than validated their decision.

Vimium-FF, Tridactyl, and Vim Vixen adapted. It's true the APIs that allow this kind of thing lagged behind for a while, but there was enough interest to eventually develop those APIs.

P.S. Vimperator had 15,000 users according to https://web.archive.org/web/20171016205807/https://addons.mo... Vimium-FF alone has 26,000 now.

FWIW, there are quite a few things that haven't been added to the API, most importantly the ability to accept key events from pages where our content script isn't running.

In fact, very little has been added that has made our life easier (the main one being the search API) since we first started developing Tridactyl. Features have actually been taken away from us - notably the ability to operate on PDFs.

Not to detract from your point, though - most of the API was already there and fine in September 2017.

Thanks for the update. It's been a long time since I've seen this brought up here.

I should probably add that the containers API is really cool and a major thing that was added. I use it all the time from Tridactyl.

>FWIW, there are quite a few things that haven't been added to the API, most importantly the ability to accept key events from pages where our content script isn't running.

Speaking as an end-user, I find the eagerness with which web developers re-purpose key events to be extremely aggravating. If I hit ctrl-F, I want to use Firefox's native full page text search, not jump to the in-site search box.

I'd like to see Mozilla start treating key event capture as an opt-in-required permission like site notifications, location, camera, and microphone. Currently the only way to blanket-deny permission to capture key events is by disabling javascript. That's not ideal.

We have a thing in Tridactyl for this, actually ("blacklistkeys" if you're a user).

You roll your own by writing a userscript (e.g. Tampermonkey) that adds an event listener to keydown which runs key.cancelBubble = true and key.stopPropagation(). See line 343 https://github.com/tridactyl/tridactyl/blob/master/src/conte... (starts "leavegithubalone").

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